Descriptive Writing

As Sue opened her white, round window with chipped off paint to breathe in the fresh cold morning air, she heard her mother's voice ringing through the house like a thousand thunders drumming together calling unto her. 

Anyone reading the sentence above will appreciate the mental image that the words helped to create to visualize and  understand the author's message about Sue's mother. Painting a vivid picture, afford readers a deeper understanding of a  text and cause a text to come alive, authors utilize descriptive words and phrases as well as  literary devices. Without descriptive words, our pieces of writing will be as bland as food without salt.

On 29th October, 2019, we began to delve into a new genre of writing, Descriptive writing. Our lecturer deviated from the ways that she would normally teach the genres of writing and adopted a new strategy. She utilized lesson planning to teach this genre. We were placed in groups of three to engage in the lesson planning whereby we had to develop objectives and brainstorm ideas to describe a favorite fruit. One of our prepared cognitive objectives,  was to define the term adjectives. Our introduction of the lesson  began to unfold, however, time was against and so we had to complete the remainder of the lesson plan for homework. When describing such topic, it was proposed that a graphic organizer was effective  to be used in the classroom to help students  generate descriptive ideas utilizing their senses.  This graphic aid has proven to be very useful when teaching descriptive writing across all grade levels as it allows the students to  better organize their ideas logically, generate adequate ideas to incorporate in their pieces and integrate sensory details to add substance to their writing. Learning of this graphic aid made the thought of descriptive writing a lot more intriguing and less complex as some persons perceive it.In retrospect, we believe that if such technique had been introduced to us back in the early grades, many of the challenges that we grappled with in writing would have been averted. Our course lecturer’s hand in ensuring that we are fairly equipped with the skills and competencies that we need to become efficacious teachers of writing is truly commendable. We do hope to continue learning techniques from her so that we can  effect changes in our schools and make writing more enjoyable to the many students entrusted in our care.

 The ability to describe people, places, experiences or objects accurately is a useful life skill. Whether you are chatting with a stylist about "hooking" you up with a particular hairstyle, sharing a funny or startling scene from your day via email or text message, reporting on some concept in a biology class, you will use description to bring your point across. Descriptive writing is utilized everyday by all of us.  As a result, it should be a skill taught well by teachers of writing as early as the primary grades.

 The five senses cluster

Our senses provide us with information around us. They tell us how smooth an object feels; sweet, sour or bitter something  tastes; how  bright the sunflower looks and how sweet scented or malodorous scent of something. As teachers of writing we must not take for granted the use of our senses when teaching descriptive writing. Many times when students are engaged in descriptive writing, they seldom use their  five senses to gather information about the world. Were they taught how to gather details about their environment? Is a very important question to ask.They are not to be blamed for their deficiencies in this area but the blame belongs to the teacher.

To ameliorate this problem, there are several strategies that  efficacious teachers of writing should deploy  in the classroom to get students to the point of automatically brainstorming descriptive ideas about an object or person.  One of those strategies is the use of the five senses cluster. This is a graphic organizer which contains five different compartments which is used to generate ideas that relate to a specific sense. It is used during the prewriting phase of the writing process. Students will be able to seamlessly produce ideas about their topic by ensuring that they add information in the five senses cluster where applicable.

What if this strategy was used in the classroom back in the day? Would it have had a great effect on our descriptive writing skills? Teachers merely just asked us to write a descriptive piece but never demonstrated how it was done resulting in poor pieces. With the use of the five senses cluster to accumulate information on a certain object, person or animal students will have a stronger platform to write clear, descriptive texts exuding clarity by creating mental pictures.

Other strategies that can yield success in the teaching of descriptive writing include using mentor texts so students can locate and annotate on the description used; teacher modeling so students can live vicariously through the teacher and writing prompts to encourage students to write as the write on relatable experiences.

Below is an example of a five senses cluster that can be used in the development of a descriptive piece.

 Embedded  below are links to sites that will provide additional resources on descriptive writing as well as the teaching of it.  Please ensure that you take time to read to this video for your edification on this graphic organizer.



https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zx499j6/revision/4

https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/descriptive_writing